Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher. She developed Objectivism, a philosophy centered on objective reality, reason as the means of knowledge, rational self-interest as the basis of ethics, and laissez-faire capitalism as the proper social system.

Rand emigrated from Soviet Russia to the United States in 1926, arriving with a deep-seated opposition to collectivism shaped by her experiences under Bolshevism. She began her writing career in Hollywood as a screenwriter before achieving literary success with her novels We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943), and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged (1957), which collectively sold tens of millions of copies and portrayed heroic individuals battling statist forces.

Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, later known as Ayn Rand, was born on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia (renamed Petrograd in 1914), into an upper-middle-class Jewish family of Ashkenazi descent. Her father, Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, operated a successful pharmacy business that provided financial stability, while her mother, Anna Borisovna Kaplan, managed the household and had interests in literature and theater. The family resided in a bourgeois environment oriented toward European culture, with limited emphasis on religious observance despite their Jewish heritage.